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Radiology looks to other fields for strategies to manage an avalanche of image information
By: Merlina Trevino
SCAR has fired its opening salvo in the battle to control radiology's information explosion. TRIP, the transforming the radiology interpretation process initiative, was officially launched as the society's annual conference closed.
"It's time for a paradigm shift to occur in medical image interpretation," said Dr. Richard Morin, Hollern professor of radiology at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, FL.
To jump-start the TRIP initiative, SCAR organizers invited representatives from the government, space, and entertainment industries to share their experiences.
Richard Weinberg, Ph.D., a research associate professor at the University of Southern California School of Cinema-Television, described how the entertainment industry is coping with the same data dilemma that radiology faces. Both professions deal with storage, security, film-to-digital transition, and the need for standards. Weinberg predicted that DVDs, the most rapidly accepted technology in history, will go a long way toward alleviating storage issues. While the industry moves toward digitization, however, film is still the medium of choice, and vendors continue to develop new stocks of film.
In another field that processes large amounts of data, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) gathers geographical information and merges it with intelligence reports in support of national security.
Agency representative William Young described cultural problems NIMA is experiencing in its shift from film to digital media. Many analysts at the agency keep a "shoebox" full of pertinent information that they can search through faster than any digital database.
"People like what they can touch and feel," Young said.
NIMA has some of the same data storage issues as radiology, but on a grander scale. The agency's National Information Library features a capacity of 6600 terabytes, with 25 million catalog items. While a radiology department may process 5 TB of data in a year, NIMA processes that much information daily. On any given day, more than 16,000 users send 80,000 queries to the library. To deal with these daunting storage and retrieval challenges, the agency uses a hierarchical storage setup with RAID, robotics, and shelves. It is looking into DVDs for storage as well. Because NIMA is a government agency, it doesn't have the luxury of purchasing the most up-to-date technologies.
"We never want to get on the bleeding edge of technology, because it costs too much," Young said.
Stephen Wharton, Ph.D., chief of the Global Change Data Center of the NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center's Earth Sciences Directorate, was struck by the similarities among the different industries.
"There are a lot of areas where we can be mutually supportive," he said.
Wharton's group analyzes the characteristics of the earth's systems to facilitate climate and rainfall pattern prediction and hurricane tracking. The center also maintains a repository of information that has been collected in the past.
Dr. Katherine Andriole, current SCAR chair, reiterated the purpose of the TRIP initiative. By bringing together these different industry representatives, the society hopes to inspire radiologists to initiate their own research projects in an attempt to solve the data explosion problem.
Andriole described a project presented at last year's RSNA conference by Michael Teistler, a student at the Technical University of Braunschweig in Germany. Teistler developed a virtual reality prototype that allows radiologists to navigate through data rendered into a 3D image by manipulating a small handheld tool. They can use their own bodies as navigation tools.
"We need to bring the problems out into the open and facilitate the exchange of ideas," Andriole said.
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